Police in Indonesia arrest student for filming bribery

Adlun Fiqri Sigoro (middle) was arrested for defamation after uploading a video of alleged police bribery to You Tube.

Last week, Indonesian police on the small island of Ternate, North Maluku, created an outrage on social media when they arrested a university student named Adlun Fiqri Sigoro. The student committed the “crime of slander” after uploading a YouTube video that allegedly showed cops accepting bribes in public from traffic violators.

The video went viral instantly, reported the Jakarta Globe, and North Maluku police chief Zulkarnain confirmed the Ternate district police charged Adlun with defamation, a violation of Indonesia’s notorious Information Technology and Electronics Transactions (ITE) Law.

The video, which Adlun uploaded on Saturday, was about one minute long and candidly portrayed traffic cops taking petty cash from motorists. On Friday, the police refused to free the student. The department’s chief of crime Samsudin Lossen said he was unafraid of facing the National Police Commission and the National Commission on Human Rights, as Adlun had confessed to the crime of defamation.

Police freed Adlun later in the week, following social media campaigns that snowballed into mainstream media coverage. If found guilty, Adlun could have faced up to six years in prison. Chief Zulkarnain told local media that the video posted by Adlun was not what it seems.

“The traffic police officers were simply taking fines for safekeeping. They were not taking bribes,” the general said as quoted by Detik. Zulkarnain claims the funds collected were to be deposited appropriately as traffic fines, although collecting cash in public is not an orthodox police procedure. Currently, the video is nowhere to be found on YouTube.

See: Indonesian man convicted of libel on Twitter, protest surges over draconian internet law

Political martyrdom may have been better

Some argue the police conceded after receiving heat from social media activist groups and mainstream media. Following the arrest, people across Indonesia took to Twitter and Facebook, condemning the district police via campaigns with hashtags like #SaveAdlunFiqri and #KitaAdalahAdlunFiqri (We Are Adlun Fiqri). The nation’s Institute for Criminal Justice Reform participated in the social campaigns as did the Alliance for Independent Journalists. With such pressure, it’s conceivable the police dropped charges out of fear of creating a political martyr.

This is not the first time Indonesia’s controversial ITE law has been spotlighted by media and free speech advocates. In 2014, the issue was the center of public scrutiny after Benny Handoko was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to one year probation after posting supposedly libelous comments against a politician in Indonesia.

In June 2014, a 29-year-old Yogyakarta woman named Handayani was accused of breaking the law after writing a Facebook post berating the management of a local jewelry business. The case went on for several months, and in September authorities threw Handayani in jail for days before her trial. She was found innocent in the end, however, and managed to walk away with only personal anguish and the emotional scars of wrongful imprisonment.

Images from Adlun’s Facebook page suggest he’s a human rights activist.

Lock ‘em up and empty their bank accounts